Biography

Garrick Ohlsson, a native of White Plains, NY, began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at thirteen entered the Juilliard School. Mr. Ohlsson studied with a succession of distinguished teachers, including Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne, and Irma Wolpe. He won first prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montreal Piano Competition, and in 1970 he won the gold medal at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1972.

This season Mr. Ohlsson can be heard in repertory ranging from Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Barber, and Busoni in cities including Indianapolis, Saint Louis, Washington DC, Cincinnati, Portland, Prague, Stockholm, Wrocław, and Strasbourg. In recital he can be heard in New York's Alice Tully Hall, Seattle, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico.

Mr. Ohlsson can be heard in recordings on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion, and Virgin Classics labels. He released a ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven sonatas for Bridge Records; for the third installment of this series he was awarded a Grammy. For the Hyperion label, he recorded a sixteen-disc set of the complete works of Chopin and discs of music by Brahms, Granados, and Charles Tomlinson Griffes. His recent releases include recordings of Scriabin's Poèmes, Smetana’s Czech Dances, and etudes by Debussy, Bartók, and Prokofiev. The latest CDs in his ongoing association with Bridge Records are the complete Scriabin sonatas; Close Connections, a recital of twentieth-century pieces; and two CDs of works by Liszt. In recognition of the Chopin bicentenary in 2010, Mr. Ohlsson was featured in the documentary The Art of Chopin. Most recently, he appeared on live recordings of both Brahms piano concertos and Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto with the Melbourne and Sydney symphonies on their own labels, and a live recording of Dvořák’s Piano Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic for the Decca label.

Mr. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. He makes his home in San Francisco.

(February 2018)